"We've got to go," she said in a panic. "We've got to stop him."
"Stop who?" Sales asked, grasping Casey firmly by the shoulders. "What are you talking about?"
"Lipton!" she screamed at him. "It's not me he's going after, it's Patti!"
"Your assistant?" Sales said, hurrying now with her toward the front door.
"Yes," Casey said, leaping from the porch and sprinting for her Mercedes.
Sales got in beside her and braced himself as she spun up a cloud of dust and stones backing around in the driveway. "How do you know?" he asked. "What happened?"
"She left me a message," Casey told him, her hands on the wheel in a death grip. "She said Lipton called her-that I told him to-that I'd meet him there. I called her back, but I didn't get an answer."
Sales didn't say a word. He stared grimly at the road. Casey pointed at her briefcase and instructed him to take out her cell phone.
"Bolinger left me his cell phone number and I wrote it down on that legal pad. Get it and call him."
"I can't," Sales said, "remember? There's no towers."
"When will we be in range, do you know?" she demanded.
"About five more miles, I think," he said. "When we get to the bridge."
Casey stepped on the gas even harder.
"Easy," he said. "It won't do anyone any good if you kill us."
Casey didn't hear. "He's going to kill her," she heard herself saying.
"Maybe not," he said. "Maybe we can get there, or the police, maybe Bolinger can get there."
When they got to the bridge, Sales dialed the detective's number and handed the phone to Casey. They came to the top of a hill and the Mercedes lifted nearly off the ground. Bolinger answered tiredly on the third ring. In a panicked voice, Casey explained the situation. It took several minutes to communicate through the static of the bad connection, but finally Bolinger understood. He said he'd get there as fast as he could.
"I'll get a patrol car there, too. If anyone's close, they may get there sooner than either of us," the detective said before hanging up.
Casey clapped the phone shut and tossed it over to Sales. A salty drop tickled her upper lip and she realized that tears were streaming down her face. The image of being helpless and abducted herself was fresh in her own mind. While part of her was grateful to have Sales beside her, at the same time another part of her was filled with loathing and fear that anyone could do that to another person. But more than anything, the image of Patti being harmed by Lipton at that very moment pushed her to the edge of sanity.
"How far away are we?" Sales said. He had no idea where Patti lived.
"Not far from here. She's on this side of town in Sunset Valley. Fifteen minutes, maybe ten," Casey said grimly. "We should have known…"
"How could we know?" Sales argued. Inside, he was awash with his own guilt. Lipton hadn't really been in the garage the night before. Sales had commandeered the elevator himself to scare Casey into helping him. The shots he'd fired were wasted rounds that he knew no one else would hear three levels below the ground in a garage abandoned for the weekend. While he'd never tell Casey, it was he who should have at least suspected that Lipton might be up to something else. He hadn't seen a sign of him in two days.
"But how could we have known he was going to go after Patti?" he said aloud. "She wasn't on the disk."
"But she fit his profile perfectly," Casey said bitterly. "I should have suspected it… The way he, the way he turned it on whenever he was around her at the trial, stroking her for the littlest insight. Even the tone of his voice when he spoke to her was…"
She shook her head and said, "I should have seen it. But I was too worried about myself and I never even thought about her."
Sales took the pistol from his belt and carefully examined it, unloading it, sliding the action smoothly back and forth, and reloading it with a metallic snap.
"We'll make it," he said.
Casey unclamped her teeth only long enough to say, "We have to make it. My God, we have to."
CHAPTER 34
Patti was startled by the loud knock. It had come so much sooner than she'd expected. Besides the professor, she couldn't think of anyone else it could be. She hurried to the door and peered through the peephole. It was Lipton. Patti felt a strange mixture of dread and excitement. She couldn't imagine why Casey would send him to her apartment. Of course, that same enigma made it exciting.
Patti glanced quickly back into her apartment. It was tastefully decorated with dark green overstuffed furniture and white walls adorned with silver-framed posters of van Gogh's most famous paintings. Still, she felt self-conscious. She knew instinctively that it was inadequate for someone of Professor Lipton's taste and experience. He knocked again and, with a helpless sigh and a painful smile, she opened the door, letting in a hellish wave of heat from the outside.
Lipton greeted her with the same warm, handsome smile that he had when they'd first met. The gleam in his eyes would have made her think he was on drugs if she didn't know better. He also looked somewhat heavier to her, and then she realized that it was because of his clothes. Strange that he should be clad from head to toe in a dark sweat suit that he'd zipped to the top of his throat. Even his short walk from the parking lot had left his bronze forehead bathed in sweat. There was also something on his back, a duffel bag maybe, whose strap was wrapped around one shoulder and across his chest.
"Come in," she said, smiling and flipping her hair nervously behind one ear. "I wasn't expecting you this soon."
"Thank you," he said, stepping across the threshold and closing the door behind him. With a small laugh he added, "I was really just around the corner, you know."
Patti nodded and turned to lead him into the living room without noticing that he paused to throw the bolt on the door.
"Would you like something to drink?" she asked. "A soda?"
"Nothing at all," he told her, assessing the layout as he slowly followed her in. The kitchen was on the left. Beyond it was a combination dining area and living room that ended at a set of sliding glass doors leading out to a covered terrace. There was a door opposite the kitchen that led to a half bathroom. The door to the bedroom itself was toward the back of the living room on the right.
"Please, sit down," Patti said, positioning herself in front of the bedroom door with a coffee table between them. There was something unnerving about the professor, the way he was dressed and the way he looked at her. Patti knew something was wrong, but she didn't want to admit to herself that she'd done a foolish thing by letting him in. She told herself over and over that everything was fine.
"Do you mind if I use the bathroom?" he asked suddenly.
"No, please," Patti said, pointing, glad to have him out of her presence even for a moment. "It's right there behind you."
"Thank you," he said urbanely. Inside the bathroom, Lipton shed his small canvas bag and removed a pair of thick wool dress socks as well as some black leather driving gloves and a small cloth object. The other things could wait. He set the bag on the floor in the corner.
After pulling the socks over his shoes and the gloves over his hands, he looked at himself in the mirror. He, too, saw the glaze in his eyes. He was beaming, strong and virile. Nothing could stop him. It was the flush of destiny. With great satisfaction he took the cloth object and stretched it over his head. Besides the two holes for his eyes, there was only one other opening in the black mask, a small slit he could breathe through. He was death.